When Susan Stompe of Novato finishes a load of laundry, she flips a switch and the leftover water is pumped to a drip system that irrigates her garden of multiflora, tea, climbing and miniature roses, wasting not a drop.

Stompe isn't the only Marin resident who has come up with innovative ways to save water that go beyond ordinary devices such as low-flow toilets. As drought engulfs Marin and water rationing looms, there's much to learn from Stompe and others like her.

While people in the county are conservation-minded anyway, an unprecedented drought has made saving water even more important. Water rationing requiring a 25 percent cut will be imposed on most Marin residents April 1, unless the heavens open in the interim, Krishna Kumar, head of the Marin Municipal Water District, said last week.

Stompe, who is on the Marin Conservation League board of directors and well-known for her environmental activities, didn't need an outside mandate to start saving water. She and her husband Brian have had their washing machine system in place for two years now.

"The other thing we do is to take baths instead of showers, and we water our trees with the bath water," Stompe said. "We have a tube that comes out of our upstairs and goes down to the back yard." Lightly used water like bath water is also known as "graywater."

Stompe's setup was simple and easy to create, she said.

"It's not out of the reach of most people. It's low-tech and not expensive," Stompe said. "The tube attaches to a brick that is in an old sock, so it doesn't scratch the tub," Stompe said.

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The brick holds the tube underwater, and Stompe and her husband use a hand pump to get the water flowing into the tube.

"We measured to see how long the tube would have to be, then went to the hardware store and got the tube and a pump. Just a couple of pumps and the water gets going, and you set the pump aside to let the siphon do its thing. The entire setup cost less than $100," Stompe said.

Because the system has been in operation for so long, Stompe could not estimate how much water she saves compared with previous years.

While Stompe has been in her home for years, Wes Stauffer just built a new home in Tiburon. Stauffer planned his new home carefully with an eye to conservation, installing a solar array and a number of water-conserving measures. His family moved into the home in September.

One of the most unusual features is the lawn. In recent years, artificial grass has been undergoing an image transformation similar to that of Christmas trees. New types of artificial grass are more realistic than the old-school, much-maligned Astroturf, and provide a way for homeowners to conserve water.

"They mesh in a few dead-looking pieces of grass to make it look real," Stauffer said. "The product we used is called Synlawn."

On average, Synlawn costs around $15 a square foot to install, according to Brandon Kittredge, proprietor of San Rafael-based Synlawn Bay Area. While the cost is steep, it means that homeowners "don't have to install a sprinkler system, pay for lawn maintenance or pay monthly water bills," Kittredge said.

"It also reduces runoff that you would typically have on a sod lawn so you are not sending extra water to the city municipal sewerage system," Kittredge said.

The synthetic lawn covers about 5,000 square feet, and a conservation expert at Marin Municipal Water District calculated that not watering that amount of lawn would save an average of 100,000 gallons of water per year.

Another unusual feature of Stauffer's new home is the toilet. It's what is known as a double-flush toilet, with two controls, one for liquid and one for solid waste. The liquid option uses three times less water than the solid flush.

"People look at our toilet and they don't know how to flush it," Stauffer said. "There's one button for liquid and one for solid waste. I'm assistant coach of the football team at Redwood High School and a number of the guys visited my home and said they didn't know what to do."

Stauffer's previous home was built in the 1950s and had different square footage from the new house, so he could not make an apples-to-apples comparison between water usage at the two residences. However, "Our expectation is low water bills," the Tiburon resident said, and so far he has been satisfied.

When Kiki Goshay, a board member of Cool the Earth, a program that teaches children to reduce their carbon footprint, built her home in 2012, "I wanted a zero-energy house that also reduced our impact on the soil, water and air," Goshay said.

Goshay's Kentfield home is one of approximately 700 LEED-certified single-family dwellings in California. While LEED-certified public buildings are not unusual, it's rare for single-family residences to get such certification because U.S. Green Building Council standards are so rigorous. The building has features including a green roof.

The 6,500-square-foot home functions as a live-in studio for the people working on the films Goshay produces, as well as a center for her five grown children, her mother, 11 siblings and extended family.

The home's graywater system takes used water from the bathtubs, the bathroom sinks and the washing machine, filters it and stores it in a 500-gallon tank.

"Irrigation draws from the graywater tanks and then the rainwater tanks. I still have water in my rainwater tanks, so we have been recycling graywater successfully," Goshay said. Each of the two rainwater tanks holds 2,500 gallons.

The film producer had a monitoring system installed as part of her system, and watches the gauges like a hawk.

"You can't just move into a green house and say it's all done. You have to monitor your own behavior," Goshay said. "I have real-time monitoring of all my water use. I'll see a spike and then investigate to see what the culprit is." She estimates that she saves more than 3,000 gallons a month through her monitoring.

"It's nice to catch water when it rains. However, to catch and store enough from just rainwater to irrigate with, the storage has to be large. So intelligent people have said, 'Why not take the water you're using in your home and re-use it?'" said Jeff Jungsten of Mill Valley's Caletti Jungsten Construction, builder of Goshay's home.

"It's water you would ordinarily flush down the drain. Laundry, sink, showers. It's a constant source you draw from the municipality, so why not use it wisely?" Jungsten said.

"What's the biggest use of water? Showers, hot water use. So you really want to be careful with your hot water system. If you have a recirculating system, you don't have to stand there with the water running, waiting for it to heat up," Jungsten said.

"On the outside, there's all kinds of different things you can do. If you have an irrigation system, make sure your timers are set correctly. You can easily save 50 percent of your overall landscaping water use by making sure your fixtures are working correctly and not leaking," Jungsten said.

Stompe, Stauffer and Goshay all emphasized that although they already have drastically reduced their water consumption, they will comply with the anticipated 25 percent cutback from the water district.

"I've always known water is one of our most precious resources," Goshay said. "Without it, the animals, the trees, everything we love will not survive. If you are really conscious and do the research and keep checking up on yourself, you can get down to a low number. I don't want to use any more than I have to."